A wallop for the Big Bang, according to reports in BBC News and ScienceShots 19 June 2014. The recently announced proof of the Big Bang theory may disappear in a cloud of galactic dust. In March 2014 a group of researchers working with BICEP2, a telescope at the South Pole, claimed they had evidence for an aspect of the Big Bang theory that claims the universe went through a period of massive expansion, called “inflation”, in the first split second after it started to form. According to this theory such rapid expansion of the early universe would have left a distinctive pattern in the cosmic microwave background (low level of radiation seen throughout the universe). The BICEP2 scientists claimed to have found that pattern, but are now conceding that the signal they detected could be from dust in our own galaxy.
It seems that dust grains in the Galaxy could imprint a similar polarisation pattern in the CMB as gravitational waves can, and new data from another telescope, the Planck, indicates there is more dust than BICEP2 scientists estimated using models of the dust signals. One of the researchers, Clem Pryke, of University of Minnesota, explained: “Real data from Planck are indicating that our dust models are underestimates. So the prior knowledge on the level of dust at these latitudes, in our field, has gone up; and so the confidence that there is a gravitational wave component has gone down. Quantifying that is a very hard thing to do. But data trumps models”.
Editorial Comment: Pryke is correct – real observations matter more than models, i.e. pretend universes. However, we would remind Pryke and other Big Bang believers that real data not only includes observations made in the present, but should also include recorded observations actually seen in the past which those of us in the present cannot observe.
The beginning of the universe, along with the origin of all things, living and non-living, is history. Interpreting present data to ‘make up a history’ leads to dusty problems like the one above. To understand what happened in the past we do need the record of one who was there and we have that record, left us by the Creator, and we ignore it at our peril. Not just because we need his revealed framework to understand what we see in the present, but because the One who controlled the beginning also controls the future. (Ref. cosmology, physics, astronomy, space)
Evidence News vol. 14, No.11
2 July 2014
Creation Research Australia